Darren Sarisky

Project leader:
Dr Darren Sarisky (Australian Catholic University) with Dr Barnabas Aspray
Title:
Hermeneutics and Transcendence: Toward a Synthesis
Description:
Continental hermeneutics has illumined how person-specific interpretive frameworks operate in all human attempts to understand the world. Yet some accounts of interpretation make it difficult or even impossible to appeal to divine transcendence. This creates the problem that lies in the background for this project. If a theory of hermeneutics, which is attractive in that it sheds light on the subject-specificity of interpretive frameworks, simultaneously prohibits reference to the divine, can it prove fruitful in grasping the ways the world communicates a reality beyond itself? Can hermeneutics help us see how people understand the meaning of spiritual information?
While some versions of hermeneutics unsettle engagements with the divine, might an appropriately formulated version of the ideas ultimately enrich our understanding of how spiritual information is interpreted? This research effort hypothesizes that it is possible to marry divine transcendence to the insights of hermeneutics. The project will test this supposition in two ways: (1) by locating tensions between divine transcendence and hermeneutical thought in recent discussions, and (2) by beginning to develop constructive proposals unencumbered by such tensions.
The project leader will convene a research group of international collaborators who have established themselves at the leading edge of this discussion. The primary investigator and his seven research group members will gather in-person for two symposia and six supplementary virtual workshops. The main academic output of this project will be a special issue of a journal that brings together the papers from the discussions. This output will be complemented by the project’s public outreach efforts and three course syllabi, all of which will make the major findings of the project accessible to a broader audience.
Final report:
Our project’s main question was whether it is possible to have a finite, community-specific vantage point on divine transcendence. That is, does admitting that any perspective is finite and community-specific entail that the divine is not genuinely accessible to us, as if we are simply locked into our own points of view? Or, can we genuinely engage with the divine but do so from a specific vantage point? While there was not a perfect consensus among our research team members, the majority view was that a synthesis between transcendence and hermeneutics is possible. To unpack this fully would entail defining the terms much more closely, as the essays do, and modifying in certain respects frameworks that have the most influence in the current discussion.
We will have a cohesive and rigorous edited collection published by a selective publisher. The essays have been written so as to be readable, with the result that they should be useful in classroom settings for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students.
I have also written and received feedback on a pathway to scientific engagement document.
Around the time that the edited collection is released, I will engage in a coordinated set of activities to communicate our findings to a broad audience.